Why, he said, did I want to install solar power when my electricity consumption was so high?

What, I thought? My family's consumption was about half that of the typical family in my area. I'd already switched many incandescent lights to compact fluorescent lights, bought ENERGY STAR replacements for my fridge, washer and dryer, and torn out the energy-wasting electric baseboard heaters in my poorly insulated kitchen extension after adding decent insulation.

He told me I ought to be able to cut my electricity use in half again. Down to a quarter of what my neighbors use, I asked? Why not, he said? And he told me how to do it.

First, he talked me into buying a little device - the Kill A Watt meter - which is a home energy monitor. You plug the Kill A Watt meter into a wall outlet, then you plug a device (fridge, coffee maker, table lamp, whatever) into the meter. The meter tells you how many watts of electricity the device consumes, and, over time, how many kilowatt hours an appliance like a refrigerator uses.

Then he told me to measure everything in my house. Since I'm a numbers guy, the idea of measuring appealed to me; I measured everything I could. Fridge, freezer, toaster, stereo, computer, cable modem, clock radio, plug-in carbon monoxide detector, you name it. I measured devices that couldn't be plugged into the meter (such as dishwasher, where the plug is buried, and stove, which runs on 220 volts) by watching the electricity meter outside my home. Then I estimated what was left, which mainly consisted of lights (the wattage is printed on the bulb; multiply by hours of use per day and divide by 1,000 to get kwh per day). I used an Excel spreadsheet to calculate how much electricity our house used each month, and, to my surprise, when I checked my utility bill, my estimate was bang on.

The revelation was how much electricity my stuff used that I really didn't benefit from. For example:

- My coffee maker was plugged in all day with its little LED clock. 2 watts of continuous power doesn't sound like much, but that adds up to 17 kilowatt hours per year. That was more than one day's worth of my family's energy consumption just to avoid having to unplug and plug in the coffee maker.

- I always hibernate my computer when I'm not using it, but I was leaving the cable modem and wireless router on. Between them, they were using 30 watts continuously - 262 kilowatt hours a year.

- That carbon monoxide detector was drawing 5 watts. What incentive does the manufacturer have to make it as energy efficient as possible, when I'm the one paying the bill? Why not use a battery-powered CO detector instead?

- The television and DVD player combined were using another 30 watts even when turned off. Why? Because both were sitting there waiting for me to power them on via remote control. (There are actually home energy saving devices known as standby savers, that you can use that save most of this power.)

- The fridge was using more than it was supposed to. So I checked that with a thermometer, and discovered one of my kids had accidentally bumped the temperature dial on the freezer compartment (ours is a bottom freezer) and set it way colder than it needed to be. Fixing that saved nearly 1 kwh a day right there!

Most of these things sound insignificant on their own - especially when you just look at the watts consumed or the amount of power per day. But when you consider that they're all running continuously, it really does add up - in our case, cutting this kind of waste did almost exactly what the solar engineer said it would - it cut our energy bills nearly in half again!

That's right - we were only using about 16 kilowatt hours per day of electricity before I started toying with solar energy, and the local average in my area for a house of 4 people is about 33 kwh per day. By the time I was done with my Kill A Watt meter, we had our consumption down to 8 kwh per day.

Once you get your consumption down to that level, a solar electric system starts to make sense (especially with all the financial incentives for installing solar power). But in the end, what did I do?

Just kept track of electricity usage and made sure we kept it down. The net impact is that we now save more energy through these conservation measures, than we would have generated if we'd installed a solar power system and not made any changes in our behavior.

I'd recommend a Kill A Watt meter - or any similar home electricity monitoring tool - to anyone seriously interested in cutting their electricity use. I paid $60 for mine, and it paid for itself in only three months. Nowadays you can buy them for about $20, so the payback period could be down to a month. And if you didn't have the head-start I had - if your home is in the 30+ kwh per day range to start with - you'll save even more.

As far as electricity consumption goes, what you don't know can't help you!